The success of advertising campaigns depends on making efficient use of an advertising budget so as to maximally influence audience behavior. For example, if a campaign is directed to selling a product, then the advertiser may seek to use a given budget to purchase advertising so as to cause a maximum amount of consumers to purchase the product. Determining how to efficiently and optimally spend an advertising budget, as well as implementing and managing an ongoing advertising campaign (or campaigns) utilizing such a budget, however, can pose a daunting challenge to advertisers.
Increasingly, advertising campaigns include online or Internet-based advertising. With ever-increasing Internet use, it is only natural that greater advertising resources are directed to this audience. Furthermore, Internet-based advertising allows great opportunities for advertisers to deliver more targeted, relevant ads than conventional, off-line advertising techniques, such as billboards, newspapers and the like.
An increasingly important area of advertising includes sponsored listings. Such listing can be presented, for example, in the form of sponsored links appearing among the results of a search conducted on an Internet-based search engine, such as Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, etc. For instance, auction-based systems exist in which advertisers bid on-line to be included among the sponsored search results for a particular search term or terms, and for the ranking or prominence of the placement of their sponsored listing among such results.
Online advertisers participating in such an auction-based system may face the challenge of managing and optimizing potentially frequent bidding on, for example, each of thousands or hundreds of thousands of search terms or groups of search terms. Moreover, an advertiser may need to manage and optimize numerous advertising campaigns across numerous disparate portals. Furthermore, an advertiser may need to manage and optimize off-line components of an advertising campaign or campaigns. All this, while the advertiser's skills and energies are needed and may be better suited for many other different business tasks.
Existing techniques for managing and optimizing advertising campaigns fall far short of providing efficient, effective solutions to these problems. Therefore, there is a need in the art for systems and methods for managing and optimizing advertising campaigns.